My childhood blurs in yellow light and cinnamon air, the year irrelevant. A single Gloria holds all my Christmas Eves: nights when we breathe dragon-smoke, clutch rain-crinkled paper and sing to our streets, two tunes at once and all out of time. This is the closest I come to faith; out-of-tune voices make the lyrics […]

How can a year open on a blank page? “Write here.” Write that the sky splits open like a crypt For the rain to fall in. And half-starved birds come tumbling From the sky onto the bones of trees. Who could doubt the myth Of spontaneous generation? That maggots might spring Fully-formed From the carcass […]

we tread our river-ice skulls crown to temple in ink-black leather boots, steel-toed careful – these are still our most fluid bones, paper-thin; beneath we are all running water, sleeping fish and unlined pages, crinkled tissue lobes. Make fresh footprints, but imagine softly. Here at the ending there is no upstream, downstream of left-to-right, paragraphs, […]

Spine curving like a snow-heavy branch, each vertebra interlocking with the cold wall’s stone, feeling numb cement fingers along his back through ten years of worn cloth. He is invisible, a grey brick chameleon with severed vocal cords. He sees life’s soft glow framed with silver and he remembers. He remembers his wedding. It was […]

january and we sleep under bruise-light / and the wasps smuggle themselves between the panes of my double glazing and die. i’ve spent the new year living honeycombed which means my thoughts are turning geometric—/ /—which means i want to hold very still and fill with honey or some other reminder of summer. or to […]

Everything shut down and dead for the day; even my own cosy abandonment is worried it will catch a fever, break out into a delirious sweat and burn the house to meltwater. Nothing but the nothing of white outside; I watch the news expecting yet more stark death, knowing only the warm ones will go, […]

It’s snowing in the Sahara. I saw the pictures – of white-capped dunes beside camel and cactus, the white on orange of Martian blizzard the extraordinary is becoming so familiar as to stare unphased at newspapers’ wry words of white Christmasses in North Africa and wet winters on English plains And the cherry blossoms are […]

The singing bees, Allured by beds Ablaze with kaleidoscopes Of sweet peas, marigolds, foxgloves and sunflowers, Bathe in the syrups Until their furs are soaked and fat. Then that lullaby, The warble of the ice-cream man, Pipes through melting streets. His van charms flocks Bleating for lollies, cones with flakes, Rainbow sprinkles and doubles with […]